The Fine Line Between Charity and Abuse of the System

My mother owns an agency that provides home-based therapy services for children under the age of three. Every year around the holidays I am reminded of a story she shared with me several years ago.

After the new year, my mom went to a family's house to work with their child. Upon entering the house, she was surprised to see wrapped gifts still stacked against the wall. The parent joked that they had so many presents that year that they simply hadn't had the time to open them yet. The family was on public assistance, so this confused my mother. The parent further explained that she made sure to get her children on as many charity lists as possible that year – churches, community groups, schools, etc. The pile of gifts was only a small portion of the donations and didn't include food and household items or gift cards. The parent openly shared all of this with my mother.

It's because of this incident that I am weary to donate money for holiday gift cards at my school. I completely understand that the story my mom shared may not be the norm, but it proves that it is quite difficult to find the line between much-needed charity and abuse of the system. This year, my school raised enough money to give 40 families each a $50 Walmart gift card. As a school, we should be proud that we are able to help so many people, however, I can't get past the fact that some of those families called the school and were asked to be added to the charity list.

How many of those 40 families asked to be added to other lists as well? Is their Walmart gift card destined to end up in an overflow gift pile similar to the one my mother witnessed? And how are we to know that the card didn't go toward cigarettes or alcohol?

In the past, the team of teachers I work with have chosen a student that we know could use a little holiday cheer. We buy him/her a few outfits and maybe a pair of sneakers and then mail the package to the house. I feel good doing this. First, the gift is going to the child. Second, we have the freedom to choose who we think most needs a donation based on our daily observations. It's a lot of extra footwork to prepare the package, but it's worth it knowing that the donation is needed and truly appreciated.

This post is by no means a slam at anyone who donates money around the holidays. I give credit to anyone who is willing to share the wealth, especially to those in need. It's just a shame that some people are willing to exploit the kindness of others. Charities and not-for-profit organizations have been on my list of interests lately, so this will probably not be the last post on this topic. In the meantime, I would appreciate any feedback on good groups/organizations/programs that you feel comfortable donating to. I want to make a difference and would love to know the most effective way to do so...

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Is there a Movie for this Book? (And other frustrations with film adaptations)

The worst part of reading with students is the inevitable question that is always asked: Is there a movie for this? For ELA teachers, this is equivalent to telling Bobby Flay not to bother with dinner because you would prefer to order a pizza and wings.

Most stories we read in class do have movie adaptations – if they are good enough to dedicate class time reading, they were probably good enough for someone to make into a movie. I don't like showing the movie out of obligation, and the typical movie/book-compare/contrast activity is near worthless in my opinion. To make matters worse, the availability of a movie doesn't necessarily mean its any good. Some movie versions of books are quite awful – take the 1981 made for tv adaptation of Todd Strasser's book The Wave, for example. (After starting the movie, kids actually complained about having to finish it.) But any teacher who admits that a movie exists but refuses to show it will face a potential mutiny in his/her classroom.

So how can teachers use a movie version of a story as a valuable resource rather than a frivolous time-killer?

I was faced with this question several weeks ago after reading Shirley Jackson's classic short story, The Lottery. I was teaching a unit on setting, mood, and tone, and I felt this story would work nicely in exploring how these elements work together. The kids loved the story, but I was not sure how to wrap up the unit. The Lottery film adaptation from the 1960s is dated and kind of slow moving, but my students insisted they see it anyway.

The film version is only about 20 minutes long, and as I watched it with the class I again noticed how drawn out the story was. I realized that it could probably have been boiled down to three minutes of actual substance – and this gave me an idea.

After watching the movie, my class agreed that the movie did not do justice to the story. I told them that the final assignment for The Lottery was to create a music video that accurately portrayed the setting, mood, and tone of the story. They could use any song they'd like that they thought fit those requirements, but they only video footage they were allowed to use were clips taken from the film.

To do this, I found the complete film posted on Youtube. I downloaded it from there using Keepvid and then converted it to a usable format with Format Factory. From there, students used Movie Maker to cut and splice what they considered to be important scenes together to fit with the soundtrack.

The group took to the technical labor of this assignment much quicker than I anticipated. It was also interesting to see the variety of songs they were able to successfully apply to the film. We had everything from Tom Jones to Bob Marley, but they all managed to edit the film in such a way to meet the needs of their songs. I was impressed.

This worked especially well with The Lottery, but I could also see it being an excellent culminating project for other short stories (with bad movie adaptations) – The Tell-Tale Heart, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, maybe even novels like The Outsiders, if broken down by chapter. The beauty is that all of these are available on Youtube, so finding the raw materials your students need is not very difficult.

Obviously, this treads dangerous copyright ground, so you may want to refrain from posting students' finished work. I, however, am not heeding my own warning – here is the sample project I made for my students to use as a reference. I made sure to disclose that I am not the owner of any of the materials – the song is Know Your Enemy by Green Day, and the movie is The Lottery, directed by Larry Yust.

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Professional Development VS. Personal Development

Last year I made the New Year's resolution to learn how to play piano. I found a quaint music shop that offers lessons, and every Wednesday I wait along with the other students (most being about half my age) in the lobby with lesson books in hand. I don't teach music, but the experience has reminded me what it's like to be the one whose job it is to learn, not to teach.

It's important to always be learning something new. If we forget what it's like to learn, then how can we expect others to learn from us? We hear all the time about professional development, but I'd hope that we are aware of personal development as well.

Can the personal and professional merge? They better, or else you may be in the wrong profession. Take, for example, my most current New Year's resolution. I've always wanted to learn how to create Flash applications, and with the help of my Instructional Technology department I now have a fresh copy of Adobe Flash CS4 Professional installed on my teacher workstation. While – and I'm aware that this is an awfully nerdy thing to admit – learning this is mostly grounded in recreational purposes, I can see Flash-based web apps, games, quizzes, and even iPod Touch apps to be something that could be integrated into my daily class activities. How cool would it be to create my own iPhone app and then host it as a free download to students through iTunes?!

I'm not there yet, but I'm learning. Here is my first Flash project - It's a pickle navigating through a maze. Okay, maybe it's lacking in educational value.

But hey, we all have to start somewhere.

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Justin Bieber Penny Drive Winner

Back in mid December, I mentioned that my school was participating in a local radio station penny drive to raise money for Women and Children’s Hospital. The school who collected the most would win a private concert by teen heartthrob Justin Bieber.


Wouldn’t you know it – we actually won.

57 local schools participated in the contest, raising more than $150,000 (or 15,000,000 pennies) for an important and worthy cause. Almost $17,000 of that came from our students. The fact that we won is near incomprehensible, but even moreso is the thought that in the past month and a half 1.7 million pennies have passed through our hallways.

Yesterday, our building (along with the support of Kiss 98.5) held a celebratory pep rally for the kids, and while the kids’ excitement over Justin Bieber was clear, something even more important was obvious. All the work they had done was for charity, and they knew it.

The feeling that nearly 1000 screaming preteens crammed into an auditorium evokes can be contagious. Even the boys who had previously cursed the name Justin Bieber sang along to his song as it played from the stage speakers. They realized that the pep rally wasn’t to celebrate Bieber, but to celebrate our ability to come together as a school and do something truly amazing.
 

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Fundraising with Justin Bieber

Several weeks ago, local pop radio station Kiss 98.5 announced a penny drive to benefit Women and Children’s hospital. The school that raises the most money wins a special concert by teen heartthrob Justin Bieber.

The middle school where I teach is all abuzz about the potential of winning the contest. Kids are bringing in money by the bag full. So what if he’s a flash in the pan? It’s raising money for a good cause.

To help promote the contest, I started making daily Bieber pictures for teachers to hang in their rooms. I’ve been Photoshopping stupid pictures since I was about 16, so it only takes about 15 minutes for me to make one, and the kids love it. I admit that I’ve never even heard a Justin Bieber song until just recently, but again, it’s for a good cause so I’ll pretend to be as excited about him as all the kids. Teachers seem entertained too – every morning I’m greeted with an inbox full of kudos from my colleagues on the day’s Bieber propaganda.

And this is why I’m so surprised to hear rumors of a grumbling few who find my daily emails offensive or inappropriate. A colleague warned me today that she had overheard two other members of the faculty complaining. They said they were going to email me and ask to stop sending pictures.

I look forward to reminding them that my pictures are all in good fun, and intended to raise money for an excellent organization. Furthermore, I completely stand behind anything that unifies a school and creates an environment of comradery.

Or maybe I can just remind them that it’s the holiday season.

Don’t be a grinch.

 

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A Good School Fundraiser

Last Sunday my wife and I packed up the kids and headed to Applebee’s for a fundraiser breakfast hosted by the girls’ swim team. I had been hit up earlier in the week by a student – the tickets were only 5 bucks and promised pancakes and a bottomless cup of coffee, so I was all for it. It seemed like a symbiotic venture for both the swim team and the franchise. Applebee’s is typically closed Sunday morning, so they gained by charging a small building fee, and the rest was profits for the team.

But that’s not the only reason why I liked this fundraiser. Once we bundled the kids, piled into the car, and arrived at the restaurant, we were greeted at the door by several students acting as hostesses. Several other girls soon came to the table with our meals, and a girl who normally sits in my 2nd period class cleared my empty dishes. What a fantastic idea.

There’s a level of obligation to participating in fundraisers because the kid standing at your desk trying to convince you to buy candy/popcorn/wrapping paper/raffle tickets/candles is the same kid that just humored you in class and laughed at your dumb jokes. Forking over money for junk we don’t want comes with the territory of being a teacher, right?

I liked the breakfast fundraiser because it involved the kids working for the money. Maybe it's just my optimistic nature to try and see everything as a teachable moment, but you can bet those girls learned more than the kid whose mom dumped a box of fundraiser chocolates in the middle of her office with a sign saying something like “My son wants to go on a class trip to Montreal!”

You know and I know that I will probably cave regardless of the fundraiser (the $20 box of microwave popcorn sitting in my pantry is proof enough). But I appreciate it when the student at the helm and made to work for it.

In the end, whatever it is they are working toward will be more rewarding.

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9 Concessions Teachers Must Make

Concession - The act of conceding or yielding.

1. I can only control what happens in my classroom
The social aspects of school life dominate the hallways and it is going to follow students into the classroom regardless of how prepared I am. Girls will cry about a boy, boys will argue about sports teams. And both of these things will interrupt my plans.

2. There will be bad days
I am allowed to have a bad day, and so are my students. I am not allowed to take it out on my students (although I'm sometimes tempted to make them the proverbial dog that gets kicked), and they shouldn't take it out on me either.

3. Technology is going to fail
The general rule with technology is that when it decides to get sick, it doesn't hiccup. It projectile vomits. When you hand 30 students each a laptop, something is going to go wrong.

4. There will be days with no lesson plans
It's okay to show a movie. It's okay to schedule work days. It's okay to edit and revise. All within moderation, and all at appropriate times.

5. Some kids have more important things to worry about than my homework
I had a student in my room a few years ago that lived in a mobile home that didn't have running water. I have several kids (that I know of) this year whose families have had to answer to CPS. These kids have bigger problems than memorizing poetic devices for my quiz on Friday, and it's just not realistic to think that should be a priority to them.

6. Regardless of my expectations, my students are still just kids
I wrote this blog post about this earlier (which, incidentally, got me thinking about this list.)

7. There is going to be a student in my room that I dislike
I'm a pretty easy guy to get along with, but in life I accept that there will people whose personalities clash with my own. In the real world, I ignore the people. But in the classroom, they are still my students – and they can't be treated any differently.

8. Lessons will not go as planned
I openly admit to my 1st period class that they are the guinea pigs. What I do 1st period and what I do 9th are usually different. Good teachers don't stay the course – they compensate for pot holes and detours along the way.

9. Grades aren't everything
This goes not only for teachers, but for students and parents too. I had a message on my school voice mail last quarter from a parent demanding to know why his daughter's grade dropped from a 96 to a 94. It's the journey that's important, not the destination, right?

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Rationalizing Student Behavior

When I was in sixth grade, my English teacher started each week with a spelling pretest. At some point during the week the words would be used in class or as part of a homework assignment, and then the final test was on Friday. This routine was followed every week. By about June, I finally figured it out.

Every class has that kid who wanders in the door only to gasp, “There's a test today?!” I was that kid. And it wasn't because I was trying to be funny; I truly couldn't see the big picture.

It's easy to forget that our students are just kids, especially at the middle school level. They aren't going to be able to conceptualize ideas (or in my case, sequence of events!), and they aren't going to have very good follow-through. It's just the nature of the beast.

It's easy to say this right now because I don't have a bumbling student standing in front of me trying to explain his erratic behavior. But the next time I do, I hope I can think back to myself in sixth grade. Teachers should have high expectations of their students, but let's never forget that at the end of the day, they're just kids.

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